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What Makes You Tick?

What makes you grateful to feel your feet hit the ground every morning? What gets you up and out? Here are some of the things that inspire my work and keep me rockin’ and rollin’:

1. All the patients who look right into my eyes with new understanding and gratitude, and then return proud to demonstrate their new-found, hard-won (at last!) success.

2. The knowledge that I am walkin’ the walk. I enjoy telling people how old I am, because it demonstrates what a difference sleep, food and walking can make. It’s not magic.

3. My beloved husband, who nourishes all of us with his boundless love and care. I am one of those people who count my blessings every day, and for this I am grateful as well.

4. Our children. Talk about gratitude and inspiration…

5. My parents, who have been on the “wrinkle-free” diet for decades now, keeping a grand vegetable garden, a flock of chickens, and a couple of steer on their small farm at all times since the 1970s.

6. Speaking of chickens, I am inspired by what I have learned from them since having acquired my own. They have personalities, for goodness sake! They communicate with us. They take turns talking with you when you let them. And they reward you with gorgeous eggs whose shells come in colors you did not even know were possible.

7. Friends who are more as family, and who teach you and push you, nudging that bar ever higher and higher because they KNOW you can reach it. Who applaud you and support you and challenge you. Who continue to serve as a veritable fountain of ideas, always on the lookout for something new to share with you. Who laugh so hard you have to take off your glasses and wipe away the tears, and nod, smiling and wide-eyed, as you tell the same stories over and over.

8. Co-workers who reach out and take small steps and check in and share stories about their grandchildren and pets and show you they care in a great many small, immeasurable ways.

9. Creature comforts and coffee.

Now go ahead and make your own list. Then hang it where you’ll see it every day. To your good health!

It was interesting to read the comments about what the other folks were grateful for. It seems the more I’ve lost the more fundamental my gratitude list gets.

When lost my wife and family, my brother and my two best friends in the course of six weeks, my gratitude list was really simple: Air to breathe, food to eat, a place to lay my head down at night that was inside. Then my health began to fail and as a result I lost my job but I was fired unfairly. Who can I turn to now, now that everyone, and everything is gone? Only God remains and so now my gratitude list is very short : thank you God.